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Oct 21 Weekend Roundup: October 21

"Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground." Teddy Roosevelt

What I’ve been working on:

Same old, same old this week. Prepping for the launch of a new RightNow Media Originals series next week, so most of the programming will promote that. I also tried to a do a better job of getting Instagram stories up every day (and brainstormed ideas for more to have on deck.)

I also decided that a valuable skill for me to own within the team would be photography. I used to do "real" photography before I got an iPhone and got lazy, so I spent most of my margin this week going back over the basics of DSLR and refamiliarizing myself with a camera that's not also a texting device. I'm rusty, but it will definitely play a role in the way I want to steer our social content and it's just more efficient than trying to explain a shot I'd like to someone else. I'd also forgotten how satisfying hearing/feeling a shutter click is. It's the little things, people.

(For the curiously inclined, I took this Skillshare class, and it was awesome. Would highly recommend. I posted an Instagram story of my notes at some point during the week and people really seemed to like them, so those are below, too. Good luck reading them.)

My (as she put it the other day) "Instagram friend/friend IRL just a really long time ago” Katie Wojciechowski started sending out a weekly newsletter, and you should sign up! Katie is genuinely artistic (not just in the things or words she creates, but in the things she appreciates and shares), thoughtful, but also very funny. I think that’s a rare and especially delightful combination for some reason.

So Texas Monthly basically published a longform piece on evangelical Christianity from a secular viewpoint, and I’d urge any Christian to set aside defensiveness and take advantage of the perspective on how the world sees us currently. It’s fascinating. I don’t necessarily have a “stance” on the article, but I will say this: Too often, others’ issues with Christianity today are dismissed as their misunderstanding — but communication is a two-way street. If my beliefs are consistently misunderstood, I need to take responsibility for my articulation and implementation of them. Does that make sense? This piece brought up some important ideas and questions that I think Christians need to address with humility — not shifting our doctrine (quite the opposite), but almost certainly shifting our attitude.

I can’t stop playing these design games. I justify it by saying they’re helping me up my graphic design skills. Is that actually true? Probably not to the level that justifies the amount of time I’ve spent on them. But it’s fine.